


Victory is Hers

by breeanna



Category: Tablet computers (commercials)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breeanna/pseuds/breeanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>iPad tries to find something she's better at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Victory is Hers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VanniTrav](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanniTrav/gifts).



If she was sentient, iPad would say that she was frustrated. She'd looked it up on her dictionary app, and it meant “to prevent from accomplishing a purpose or fulfilling a desire; thwart.” And that was how she was feeling.

More specifically, she wanted to be the very best tablet that there could be. That was her desire. She was not made in the image of anything that was second-rate. She was made by Apple, for crying out loud.

Not that she could cry, although she had seen videos of it on YouTube and knew that it was a good way to let all of one's emotions pour out of them.

You might even say it was cathartic. Another word that she had looked up.

If she wasn't going to be the best and shiniest tablet on the marketplace, she was at least going to be the most determined and ready to adapt to whatever came her way. So if that meant memorizing the details of the Merriam-Webster app and predicting what someone was typing based on the keys that they meant to hit, so be it.

It was just _hard_.

No one ever said that taking the tablet world by storm would be easy, however.

She just had to find the one thing that she was better at than the Windows 8 tablet. She had to prove to herself – and to all of her naysayers, because her fans (she knew they existed) would listen to anything she said – that she had good qualities too.

Sure, maybe Windows didn't squawk when someone pinched their screen. But who needed that feature anyway?

Not her, that much was for sure.

So she decided to look within herself – within the hundreds of thousands of apps and multitudes of features that she had available to her – and see if she could find what made her better. If nothing else, she would learn everything that she could do.

* * *

Windows was reading a book on his screen – probably something by Jonathan Safran Foer or someone equally as pretentious, she thought angrily to herself, and she decided to fight back. It was time to take him down a peg or two in the world's estimation.

So she sat there. She flipped through her Kindle app and read snippets of various bestsellers as she scrolled. Stories ran through her screen as she looked for something to catch her eye. She kept scrolling, before settling on a good classic that she had read many times before. And she started reading.

Before long, she was caught up in the story. Every now and then, she managed to tear herself away from the story long enough to see what Windows was up to. For some time, they were both reading quietly. Not that Windows wasn't usually quiet. She had never really heard him say a word in the entire time they had known each other. For all she knew, he was mute and only expressed his thoughts through actions. After about ten hours of reading (she looked at the digital readout clock on her screen), she looked up again, only to see Windows's screen dark.

His battery had died.

And yet, she was still going strong. Maybe she wasn't at full power necessarily, but she wasn't going to be going to sleep any time soon. Her battery kept her going for another couple hours of reading, before she too finally went.

Victory number one: she had a better battery life, by a considerable enough margin to make it remarkable.

* * *

She was at her wit's end. Windows kept showing off – that was what it was at this point. It wasn't even funny anymore, because all it was was something showing off what they were capable of. And it had moved from sort of acceptable to flat-out mean.

She looked over at Windows. He was playing music on YouTube, which was the closest thing she had ever gotten to words from him. It was some song about being champions, and she was about to lose it. Of course he would listen to songs about championship. All she wanted was a little humility.

She let out a groan and went back to her book. In response to her groan, and almost as if he could sense her emotions, the song switched over to some song by The Pretenders. “I'll stand by you,” she said, echoing the words of the song. “So you're not going to abandon me, even if you feel like you're better than me.”

The song continued playing on a loop, repeated over and over again until his battery died. It was strangely comforting.

Maybe he wasn't entirely a bad tablet after all. He had his faults, including his pride, but at least he knew how to make her stop having a little bit of panic in her battery life.

* * *

Her next realization came about during another one of their reading days. They were reading in tandem with each other, each of them reading their own book. Occasionally, she would look over at him. His display seemed a little...blurry?

She knew that her own display was crisp and sharp, each letter dressed to its fullest potential on the page. They called it retina display, and she knew a retina had to do with the eye – thank you, Wikipedia – so she knew that it was something good.

You always wanted to put your best foot forward, after all. And her best foot was a clear, crisp one. While his was a bit soft.

Victory number two: she rocked the display mode.

* * *

One day, as she sat there playing a round of mahjong, she came to a startling realization. As she popped off a pair of dragon tiles, she realized: she had apps. She had hundreds of thousands of apps. Multitudes of apps of all shapes and sizes and qualities. She could bounce from Facebook to Candy Crush to Skype to Netflix without missing a beat – and then dive into Instagram and Snapchat to get her inner photographer on. 

Windows was so _limited_ on what he had, by comparison.

With her, someone could take on the world. There was no limitation on what someone could accomplish. And maybe Bill Gates could run the world with Windows. She wouldn't know. She was more of a Steve Jobs girl herself, may he rest in peace.

But at least the world would have options with her, and not be boxed in.

She felt her spirit lighten. There was something that she was good at. She provided _options_.

And that was the biggest victory of them all.

 


End file.
